WIST Quotations

Pratchett, Terry -- Discworld No. 2, The Light Fantastic (1986)

Dave — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 04:25:42 +0000

Not for the first time she reflected that there were many drawbacks to being a swordswoman, not least of which was that men didn’t take you seriously until you’d actually killed them, by which time it didn’t really matter anyway.

Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Discworld No. 2, The Light Fantastic (1986)
(Source)

Orwell, George -- Essay (1939), “Charles Dickens,” sec. 6, Inside the Whale (1940-03-11)

Dave — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 16:05:24 +0000

When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page […] Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens’s photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.

George Orwell (1903-1950) English journalist, essayist, writer [pseud. of Eric Arthur Blair]
Essay (1939), “Charles Dickens,” sec. 6, Inside the Whale (1940-03-11)
(Source)

Closing words of the essay.

Shain, Merle -- (Attributed)

Dave — Fri, 25 Feb 2022 15:31:32 +0000

There are really only two ways to approach life — as victim or as gallant fighter — and you must decide if you want to act or react, deal your own cards or play with a stacked deck. And if you don’t decide which way to play with life, it always plays with you.

Merle Shain (1935-1989) Canadian journalist and author
(Attributed)

Brecht, Bertholt -- “General, Your Tank Is a Powerful Vehicle,” in “From a German War Primer,” The Svendborg Poems (1939) [tr. Baxandall]

Dave — Thu, 10 Dec 2015 15:44:28 +0000

General, your tank
is a powerful vehicle
it smashes down forests
and crushes a hundred men.
but it has one defect:
it needs a driver.

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) German poet, playwright, director, dramaturgist
“General, Your Tank Is a Powerful Vehicle,” in “From a German War Primer,” The Svendborg Poems (1939) [tr. Baxandall]